When I got home I bought and read Bogus’s Buckley book. I liked it,
and it filled in some blanks for me, history-wise. Going back and
reading the reviews, I see TNR’s reviewer
thought Bogus didn’t much improve on John Judis’ earlier Buckley book. I
can’t say. Haven’t read it. (But Judis is a good writer so probably his
book is good.) But the reviewer does grant that one area in which Bogus
really distinguishes himself is in handling the dead and forgotten ‘new
conservatives’ - Rossiter, Viereck and Nisbet, in particular. (Kirk was
another, but not one who has been forgotten.)

The most interesting passages in Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism
chronicle the new conservatives of the 1950s—Russell Kirk, Clinton
Rossitter, Peter Viereck, and Robert Nisbet — when they might still have
become the leading voices of twentieth-century American conservatism.
Theirs was a conservatism of high culture, moderation, and communal
aspiration, skeptical of the market and anchored in the writings of
Edmund Burke. In 2009, when Sam Tanenhaus declared American conservatism
dead, in the pages of this magazine and then in his book The Death of Conservatism,
it was the death of Burkean conservatism he had in mind, and George W.
Bush was the killer. For Bogus, this death occurred much earlier, with
Buckley the eager undertaker, pushing some new conservatives away from National Review.
Others, such as Russell Kirk, he labored to co-opt and thereby to
neutralize. “Today the new conservatism is forgotten,” Bogus writes.
“Even most of the intellectuals in the conservative movement itself are
unaware that this struggle [between Buckley and the new conservatives]
took place.”

Yep, nobody remembers Rossiter. Except then David Brooks goes and writes a column, just two days ago, recollecting how when he was a lad at National Review, in 1984, what Bogus calls ‘new conservatism’ was still half the story.

On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were
people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be
familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way
government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their
highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that
excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent
populace.
But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar
now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund
Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This
sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between
government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to
preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which
the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family,
company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national
government.

I’m more convinced by Bogus’ version of the story:

Even as it raged, few people were aware of the battle
between Buckleyism and the new conservatism. It was inside baseball,
something only the players themselves understood. Buckley, however,
fully appreciated the significance of his victory. In 1963, he observed
that the followers of Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck had been
successfully sidelined. They were, he wrote with obvious satisfaction,
“bound to enter the ranks of eccentricity.” Today the new conservatism
is forgotten. Even most of the intellectuals in the conservative
movement itself are unaware that this struggle ever took place. Why did
Buckleyism prevail? How did Buckley pull it off? Why was the struggle so
short and decisive? The answer has little to do with the competing
ideas themselves. The answer has to do with leadership. It is ironic
that the new conservatives—notwithstanding their philosophical emphasis
on community over individualism—were loners. Despite the commonalities
of their views, Kirk, Viereck, Rossiter, and Nisbet never united to
collectively promote the Burkean vision. It is doubly ironic that
William F. Buckley Jr. was exactly the opposite; he was philosophically
an individualist but built a community at and through National Review. (Kindle Locations 2740-2752).

As Bogus says, this was already inside baseball in 1963. 1963 was a
long time ago. So probably this is interesting mostly to historians of
the conservative movement. But one enduringly relevant lesson is this:
liberals, and the likes of David Brooks, often complain that
conservatives have recently lost their way, turning radical. Oh, for the
good old days when William F. Buckley could be counted on to write the
crazies - the John Birch Society, and Ayn Rand - out of the movement,
for the sake of preserving some modicum of sanity. I’m not sure how well
this sort of concern trolling really works, in practice. Not well, I
think.

(Everyone finds it annoying, not persuasive, to be concern
trolled.) But, in any case, it’s historically misleading. The truth is
that William F. Buckley wrote Rand out of the movement because she was
an atheist, not because she was nuts. The trouble with the Birchers
wasn’t that they were off the reservation but that they were perilously
close to being on it. What Jack
Robert Welch believed wasn’t so different from what Buckley believed,
but Buckley had the knack for saying it in a way that allowed, at the
very least, for delicacy concerning more paranoid aspects and
implications. Bogus:

Although these two men were only a few notches apart on an
ideological spectrum, they were separated by the stark line of
rationality. Welch had crossed over into an alternative universe in
which the communists were so clever and powerful that the most likely
explanation for almost any event was that the communists had secretly
engineered it. Buckley realized this, and Welch realized how Buckley
perceived him. (Kindle Locations 3588-3591)

The line was even more delicate than that, because National Review
didn’t necessarily want to write off the possibility of invoking that
alternate universe, around the edges, for rhetorical effect. And they
sure didn’t want to tell the people who were living in the alternate
universe that this is what they were doing.

The editors at National Review were in a bind. They
knew that some backers and readers were members of the society, but
they did not know how many. Buckley and his team were in the dark about
just how grave a wound they might inflict upon the magazine by
denouncing Welch and his society. Moreover, Buckley was also discovering
that even within his inner circle not everyone was as repulsed by
Welch’s conspiracy theories as was he. While Bill Rusher conceded that
Welch was peddling nonsense, he thought that many Birchers accepted
Welch’s theories as more figurative than literal — a poetic cry of
distress about the grave state of affairs. Rusher also thought that
Buckley was jealous that Welch, rather than National Review,
was leading a successful conservative membership organization, and that,
in fact, this was upsetting Buckley more than was Birch doctrine. Frank
Meyer argued that National Review had to disassociate itself
from the John Birch Society, but he thought it should be done in a way
to give as little offense as possible to society members. (Kindle
Locations 3738-3746).

Welch was peddling a version of the 47% line. We are approaching a
tipping point! The trick, as we have seen in recent days, is to be
non-specific about what you mean when you say something like
that, so you don’t come off as vicious or certifiable. Buckley was
basically worried, not that Welch was a nut, but that Welch would make
it harder for National Review to keep saying things it was
already saying and not sound nutty - since something similar sounded
awfully nutty, in the unvarnished Welch version.

Buckley’s final battle against the Birchers was analogous to
contemporary conservatives who, in the end, explicitly distanced
themselves from the Birthers, but didn’t go further to denounce the
spirit of Birtherism. That is to say: not that much has changed. What liberals are hoping for, when they hearken back to the good old days,
is not some of that good old Buckley non-craziness but something more
like what Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck offered. But Buckley had
the good sense to kill that off decades ago, since it was at odds with the spirit of the conservatism he wanted to champion.

I was going to conclude this post by quoting some choice bits from
Rossiter’s conservatism book. He’s a fine stylist and genuinely fun to
read. Much more entertaining than dull old Russell Kirk. But it looks
like I managed to leave my copy at the office. Maybe I’ll post some
Rossiter passages later. (Rossiter is actually better known for The American Presidency [amazon]. I should probably get around to reading that.)
I’ll just sign off by reiterating my recommendation of Bogus’ book as
the best history I know, where the forgotten ‘new conservatives’ are
concerned. (This is a niche market, I realize.) He’s good for filling in
the blanks regarding Buckley, if that’s what you want. I think Bogus is
right that Buckley really did make modern conservatism, so a good
biography of Buckley ends up being good general history.